That’s Deep, Man

“Can you imagine, if you were just a dumb machine . . . .”

Calvin Coolidge: Lawyer, Statesman, and Bad Bill Killer

From a National Review Online interview with Amity Shlaes, author of the new Calvin Coolidge biography Coolidge (an “illuminating, magisterial biography”):  Coolidge was trained in the (political) deadly arts.

LOPEZ: How was Coolidge “the great refrainer” and how did he make a “virtue of inaction”?

SHLAES: As he wrote his father in 1910: “It is much more important to kill bad bills than pass good ones.” Coolidge not only believed this, he trained himself in the tools of killing bills.

Things You Hear on NPR: Catholicism One Possible Direction for the Catholic Church?

NPR struggles to make sense of the fact that the Catholic Church and its understanding of human nature have remained essentially unchanged for several times longer than the United States has existed:

Well, first of all, let’s keep in mind that all the cardinals who are voting cardinals have been appointed either by Pope Benedict XVI or by his predecessor, John Paul II. So they all pretty much are — more or less follow the same kind of line of a conservative dogma, very traditional.

As if the Catholic Church might have gone in some totally different direction if only a different person had happened to be making the appointments this time around?

State of the Union 2013: Not Great

Even the liberals (and they were clearly liberals) at Politico, in their live video response after the speech, said most of it was a real “snoozer”.

If you missed the State of the Union address last night (script, video), basically the president said that he sees the millions of people and private-sector entities in America as so many finger puppets, but that fortunately, as the guy who runs the government, he thinks he has millions of fingers.

Skip the State of the Union.  Just watch Marco Rubio’s response (text), which was very good (except for the parts that weren’t):

Murderer Says He Got It from College

Via Mark Steyn, Gateway Pundit, Wintery Knight, and the Daily Caller, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the man who shot three white women in midtown Atlanta in 2011 (killing one and permanently paralyzing another) says he was just responding to what he had learned in college:

During his testimony Wednesday, Thandiwe suggested that his reason for even purchasing the gun he used in the shootings was to enforce beliefs he’d developed about white people during his later years as an anthropology major at the University of West Georgia.

Quick Thoughts on the Superbowl

I watched it (people at my church invited me to their Superbowl party).  I thought it was an exciting game, and I don’t even watch football!  The Baltimore Ravens ran up a seemingly insurmountable lead in the first half; the San Francisco 49ers made an impressive effort and almost caught up in the second half, but ultimately were unsuccessful.

Sermon Notes: Judging the Church for Christians’ Bad Behavior

The readings at church this morning were Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13, and Luke 4:21-30.  The sermon focused on 1 Corinthians 13.  A few notes from the sermon:

• “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

• The hardest people to evangelize to are those who have been hurt by the church.  (It also may get harder as time goes on, as the wound festers and becomes even worse in the remembering.)  We have the power, through our actions, to drive people away from the church and God.  That’s terrifying.